In today's society, people are turning more and more to sports for enjoyment and to relieve everyday stress. Sports teams and leagues at the amateur level are presently a rapid growth segment. In fact, a great deal of time is expended by the administrators of these teams and leagues to keep all the game data and player statistical data accurate, current, and complete.
Game data comprising, among other things, statistics is kept for individual players as well for teams and leagues. The way in which these records are kept is oftentimes by pen and paper or worse yet, memory. These methods have their limitations. For example, manually written records can become lost, damaged when in adverse environments, or altered. Further, manually written records on player statistics become unwieldy as the accumulate over time, and ultimately end up being destroyed or recycled. Also, editing paper records causes vast amounts of time to be wasted in simply locating the statistics to be edited.
The problems with the present system is therefore multifaceted. Players and teams have gaps in their personal and team performances, and players oftentimes are forced to keeping their own statistics if they want to monitor their own growth or lack thereof.
Another significant problem associated with present paper based statistical record keeping is that league administrators have old records and oftentimes incomplete, messy, and illegible records to use to make important decisions, such as what players to suspend, resolving disputes, player misconduct, and other related decisions.
Yet another problem with current record keeping techniques is that the statistics become inaccessible to the athletes, as they are kept in logs or manuals controlled by someone else, who is typically inconveniently located. Not having the statistics of how other players are performing can have dramatic effects on competitions. For example, in hockey, mismatches between competing athletes may occur resulting in injuries to one or both of the athletes.
Thus, there is a need for a better way to maintain statistical records (data) pertaining to athletes and sports teams and make this statistical data quickly available to league administrators so that he or she can make important decisions in a timely manner and therefore make the league run more efficiently and safely.